Trade-Offs and the Cost of Existence

The Thematic Claim: Every Gain Demands a Sacrifice

The central premise of Genki Kawamura’s novel forces the narrator to confront an unsparing law of the universe: nothing is free. After learning he has a Stage 4 brain tumor and only a week to live, the thirty-year-old postman accepts a devil’s bargain—make one thing disappear from the world for each extra day of life. What begins as a seemingly simple transaction slowly exposes a far deeper truth: every choice to extend his existence demands a real and irreversible cost, often paid in human connection, memory, and identity. The novel asserts that the worth of a life cannot be measured in accumulated days but in the relationships, experiences, and small presences we are willing to sacrifice to keep it. By tracing the escalating erosion of his world—from phones to movies, clocks, and eventually the threat of losing Cabbage the cat—the narrative reveals that the real cost of existence lies not in dying but in hollowing out what makes living meaningful.

The First Trade: Phones and the Price of Connection

When the devil, Aloha, first presents the deal, the narrator contemplates erasing chocolate, only to have his phone chosen instead. In a world without phones, he initially feels relief: “I didn’t make any time for reading books or newspapers, and DVDs I borrowed just piled up in my room unwatched.” The device that dominated his attention suddenly vanishes, and with it the illusion of being connected. His last phone call—allowed as a final condition—exposes a painful reality. Scrolling through his contacts, he realizes he lacks any deep human bond. The number he dials from memory belongs to his ex-girlfriend, whose number he knows “by heart.”

This first trade-off sets the thematic pattern: the narrator gains one more day but loses a technology that had masqueraded as intimacy. When he meets his ex-girlfriend at their old clock-tower spot, she exposes how the phone facilitated their relationship while simultaneously preventing genuine closeness. Their twenty-six-hour silent return from Buenos Aires—after a fellow traveler died—exposed that the “rules” of their phone-dependent college romance no longer applied. The narrator reflects that while the telephone made quick contact easy, “it also meant that we missed out on the chance to get to know each other in a more profound way.” The device’s disappearance, therefore, is not merely a superficial loss; it strips away a crutch that had long substituted for emotional presence. The extra day becomes a mirror, forcing him to stand face-to-face with his own history of shallow connections.

The Escalating Sacrifices: Movies, Clocks, and the Hollowing of Memory

As the week progresses, each new disappearance deepens the cost. After movies vanish, the narrator chooses to watch a blank screen rather than select a final film. The empty theater becomes a canvas for the memories he has traded: seeing E.T. with his parents, his mother’s death, his estranged father. He answers his ex-girlfriend’s question correctly—she rewinds sad movies hoping for a happier ending—but the satisfaction of getting it right is undercut by the irreversible loss of cinema itself. Movies, which once stored shared experiences and emotional landmarks, are now gone, leaving only his solitary consciousness to replay fading projections. The trade-off reveals that extending life through erasure doesn’t just delete objects; it deletes the containers of collective memory.

The disappearance of clocks on Thursday makes the cost even more personal. The narrator immediately thinks of his father, who runs a small clock-repair shop: “If clocks were to disappear from the world, there would be no more need for clock-repair shops. No need for that little shop, nor my father’s skills.” This trade strikes at the heart of his inherited identity. His father’s entire vocation—the workbench, the semidarkness, the meticulous craft—is rendered meaningless. The wristwatch, a symbol of both mortality and paternal connection, vanishes from his nightstand. Even as the narrator gains extra hours, the instruments that measure time disappear, creating a paradox: he is living longer while the world’s ability to mark that lived time evaporates. The cost here is not just a tool but a lineage.

The Final Refusal: Cats and the Choice to Exist Meaningfully

The ultimate test arrives on Friday. Aloha demands that cats be erased from the world. For the narrator, this trade-off is categorically different. Cabbage is not a convenience or a distraction; he is the living thread that connects him to his mother, who rescued the first cat, Lettuce, and later adopted Cabbage, who “looked exactly like Lettuce.” The narrator recalls his mother’s philosophy: “In order to gain something, you have to lose something… Even happiness is built on someone else’s misfortune.” Yet when faced with sacrificing Cabbage, he refuses. His decision to die rather than eliminate cats marks the thematic reversal: he finally understands that some things are not for trading. The extra days he gained by erasing phones, movies, and clocks were bought with pieces of himself; erasing cats would cost him the one bond that makes his remaining hours bearable.

This refusal connects to the novel’s deeper exploration of what it means to exist. Aloha later reveals he is the embodiment of the narrator’s unlived life—“the person you could have been,” cheerful, impulsive, free of worry. The devil is literally made of unmade choices and sacrificed possibilities. By refusing the final trade, the narrator reclaims authenticity: he accepts the death he had been fleeing and, in doing so, stops erasing the world. He tells Aloha, “I’m done with making things disappear from the world.” The beauty he finds in regret—“They’re proof of having lived”—redefines the cost of existence. The price of living is not what you give up to extend it but the acceptance that you will leave things undone.

Symbols that Encode the Cost

Several symbols throughout the novel materialize the theme. Cabbage the cat is more than a pet; he is the presence that witnesses the narrator’s life without demanding anything in return. When Cabbage speaks, telling the narrator “For you, sir, I would gladly disappear,” the offer inverts the deal: the narrator is no longer the one giving things up; he is the one being given to. The stamp collection he finds in a childhood cookie tin connects to his father, who sent postcards bearing a cat that resembled Lettuce. These small, forgotten treasures—stamps, tin boxes, a father’s handwriting—are proof that the supposedly useless fragments of a life are in fact its only durable currency. The postman uniform he puts on in the final chapter signifies his reclaimed purpose: delivering himself and a letter to his father, he becomes the message rather than merely its carrier.

Complexity and Contradiction

The novel does not treat trade-offs as simple moral equations. Early in the story, the narrator rationalizes the deal: the world is “drowning in crap” and removing a few things might be a service. He considers that postmen are becoming obsolete anyway, so the very idea of “necessary” is unstable. This ambiguity forces readers to ask whether any trade-off is ever truly clean. Even his mother’s principle—that gain always means someone else’s loss—is tested when she develops a cat allergy but refuses to give Lettuce away, only to have the allergy miraculously vanish. The cost was absorbed by her body, not passed on. The novel suggests that some exchanges are redemptive rather than zero-sum. The narrator’s choice to die rather than erase cats is not a loss in the same sense as the phone disappearance; it is a gain in self-knowledge, a recovery of his mother’s faith in him, and the catalyst for reconciling with his father.

Another layer of contradiction lies in Aloha himself. The devil’s cheerful Hawaiian shirts and playful manner mask his role as the accumulator of the narrator’s unlived hours. Every erased item doesn’t vanish into nothing; it becomes part of Aloha, the grinning inventory of roads not taken. When the narrator finally asks, “Wonder if I’ll have any regrets when my time comes,” Aloha answers candidly: “Of course you will.” The cost of existence, the novel implies, is not something you can ever fully discharge. You carry it to the grave, and that is exactly the point.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the novel define the relationship between gain and loss through the mother’s philosophy, and where does it complicate that philosophy?

   The mother states that “in order to gain something, you have to lose something” and that “even happiness is built on someone else’s misfortune.” The narrator initially applies this logic to the devil’s deal, trading everyday items for extra days. The novel complicates this when the mother’s cat allergy disappears after she refuses to give Lettuce away; her body absorbs the cost rather than transferring it. Later, the narrator loses his own life by refusing to erase cats, yet gains a final reconciliation with his father and a sense of peace. These moments suggest that some transactions are not about offloading pain onto others but about internal transformation.

2. In what way does the disappearance of phones serve as the foundational trade-off that exposes the narrator’s emotional isolation?

   Before the phone vanishes, the narrator is allowed one final call. He scrolls through his contacts and realizes he has no one he genuinely connects with—only the ex-girlfriend’s number, which he recalls by heart. The phone’s absence reveals that the device had been a substitute for intimacy: it let him talk for hours without ever building deep memories. The loss forces him to seek face-to-face encounters and to confront the fact that his digital connectivity was a shield against vulnerability.

3. Why does the narrator accept the erasure of movies and clocks but draw the line at cats?

   Movies and clocks are extensions of human culture and measurement, but they are not living presences. The narrator can endure losing collective memory (movies) and timekeeping (clocks) because those losses, while painful, do not sever his most primal bond. Cabbage, however, is the tangible link to his mother, who rescued the original family cat and asked him to care for Cabbage before she died. Erasing cats would annihilate the one relationship that has been constant through grief and solitude. It would mean losing the last witness to his life.

4. How does Aloha’s revelation that he is the narrator’s “unlived life” deepen the theme of trade-offs?

   Aloha explains he is made of “all those little regrets” and represents the cheerful, risk-taking person the narrator never became. Every eliminated item expands Aloha because each trade-off involves choosing safety and extra time over risk and authenticity. When the narrator stops trading, he effectively shrinks Aloha’s domain. The devil’s farewell marks the narrator’s acceptance of the life he actually lived, with all its omissions, as enough. The cost of existence shifts from what he must give up to what he is willing to embrace.

5. What role does the stamp collection play in redefining the narrator’s understanding of worth?

   While cleaning his apartment before death, he discovers a childhood cookie tin containing a stamp collection. Stamps were never obviously “useful” in the way a phone or clock might seem, yet they hold the memory of his father’s postcards—each one featuring a cat resembling Lettuce. The collection becomes a tangible record of paternal love that survived estrangement. In finding it, the narrator realizes that the overlooked fragments of a life—stamps, letters, tin boxes—are what truly constitute his existence. This epiphany motivates him to write his father a long letter and personally deliver it, converting what was once a lost connection into a live act of repair.